Body and Soul

I grimaced. And here we go…“Yeah, she took the body of a friend of mine.” True, regardless of circumstance. “And we need your help to get her out.”

“No,” he said, as firmly as before. “If what you’re saying is true, then I—”

“Yeah, yeah, you owe her, it’s all your fault. Got it,” I said impatiently. “We covered that. But you need to listen to me.” I twisted around in my seat to face him, hoping that would help him understand the gravity of the situation. “It’s not just your life that this is messing with. There is a whole family affected by her actions. Whether she gives a shit about them or not.” Alona, to her credit, had done her best to keep that in mind, at least.

He shook his head and opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off. “And here’s the truth: you have got to own up to this, man. If you want to believe it’s your fault because you let her go to the party alone, fine.”

He winced.

“But neither one of you is moving on until you deal. She is here because of you. Because youare keeping her here.” That was, in fact, a guess on my part. But it made sense. The two of them had been so tied together in life, it would follow that it would also be the case in death.

He looked up sharply.

“Yeah, you.” Based on my admittedly limited interactions with Erin, she didn’t seem to have a specific reason for sticking around, other than to live more—and what ghost wouldn’t want that? And frankly, Edmund could seeher, when he’d had no previous capacity to do so. That had to mean something, didn’t it?

Once again, it would have been so much easier if this job came with labels and a how-to manual; but no matter what, in this situation, I had to go with my instincts and hope they were enough. Even if Alona didn’t want to be—or couldn’t be—Ally again, I couldn’t leave Erin in Lily’s body. I just…couldn’t.

“It’s better than her not existing,” Ed muttered.

I took a deep breath, struggling to hang on to my patience. For most people, this was new territory, and Ed didn’t have the advantage of years of seeing ghosts and the in-between world. “It was an accident, a horrible accident. But there’s nothing you can do to change that now.”

He shook his head.

“There was nothing you could have done, even if you’d been there,” I said, getting exasperated. “They said it was a freak thing. The drop off the porch roof was only about eight feet into bushes and stuff. She probably would have survived if they hadn’t put that walkway in, like, that afternoon.”

Ed looked up. “What?” He seemed paler suddenly, even in the dim light.

Finally I was getting to him. “She fell off the porch roof,” I repeated. “And she probably would have been okay, maybe a broken bone or two, except there were these paving stones piled up from them putting in a walkway earlier that afternoon. She hit her head just right, apparently.”

Ed flopped back into his seat with a dazed expression. Apparently this was news to him. Not all that surprising, I supposed, given that he probably hadn’t been prone to reading articles about her accident back when it had happened. Maybe knowing there was nothing he could have done was all he’d needed.

Encouraged, I tried to return to my original point, the one I’d attempted to make way back at Ed’s parents’ house. “If you can let her go, it will be better for both of you. It’s true that, to you, she wouldn’t exist anymore. But this is not the end. At least, it doesn’t have to be.”

He turned his head and stared out the window, but at least he wasn’t arguing. That was an improvement.

“You can’t let her run you, man. It’s bad for both of you. You’ll still be alive, but you’ll be a shadow of what you’re supposed to be.” I knew that from experience, always living in fear of the ghosts cornering me. Having Alona as my spirit guide had helped, but until today, when I’d finally stood up to the dead on my own, I hadn’t realized how much it had weighed on me. I felt freer than I had in…well, forever.

I was about to launch into my the-light-exists-and-it-is-awesome speech when the music from the party paused, a three-second gap between songs, and I heard shrieking from somewhere behind the house. It was loud enough for me to hear it clearly even in the car, but not distinct enough to understand the words.

I did, however, recognize the voice and the note of outrage in it. Alona.

My chest contracted in fear. She was in trouble. “Crap.” I scrambled out of the car without waiting to see if Ed followed.

* * *

As should be obvious to just about anyone by now, I’ve never been to one of Rogers’s shindigs, nor have I ever had the desire to attend.

Still, it kind of surprised me, after rounding the corner at a run, to find it so…ordinary, at first glance. Nobody was snorting cocaine off anybody else’s chest. That I could see. Instead, the yard was filled with intoxicated people hanging out, eating chips, and listening to really crappy music. It could have been a night from the old days of me and my few friends hanging out, except it was outside, with about a hundred more people, and, well, our music hadn’t sucked.

It was kind of a letdown after all the hype, frankly.

Then, of course, I noticed that, despite the so-called music, no one was dancing. Most everyone was crowded around the open space between the deck and the woods, watching something.

I bet I knew what, too. The shrieking had stopped, but I could hear the occasional shouted word or grunt. Definitely Alona and Erin.

I lowered my head and started to shove my way through the crowd.

“She’s having a seizure or something,” someone whispered as I passed.

“Get her off me. Do something!” Lily’s husky voice held an uncharacteristic whine, and she sounded out of breath.

“No, dude. She’s, like, crazy or something,” another genius declared.

I elbowed through the last layer of my former classmates and tormentors and arrived to find, pretty much as I’d expected, Alona and Erin/Lily grappling for position and rolling around on the ground. To the crowd, though, it looked simply like Lily was throwing herself around for no reason.

Lea

Asshole.

None of them could see Alona, of course, but they could see a girl in obvious distress of some kind. And not a one of them had made a move to help.

Erin as Lily already looked fairly messed up, her lipstick smeared everywhere and her clothes dirty. But Alona was in worse shape, her body shifting between solid and see-through, like someone caught in the transporter beams on one of those old Star Trekepisodes.

Jesus.

I darted forward and grabbed Alona’s shoulder. She was, for the moment, on top. “Hey, stop it!”

She twisted to look up at me, startled but with fury still stamped across her features, like she might lash out at me for interrupting.

“Look at yourself,” I whispered to her.

She glanced down and stiffened in shock.

Erin/Lily laid her head on the ground and laughed with the abandon that comes with relief and total drunke

Fabulous.

Alona looked back at me with panic.

“Just stay calm,” I told her, trying to follow my own advice. Clearly, our original plan was blown to hell. And now I didn’t know if Alona had enough strength to continue existing, let alone routing Erin from Lily’s body. I never should have let her go in ahead of me.

At the moment, I was torn between the urge to grab Alona and haul her out of there to someplace safe—which, of course, was an illusion in this situation, given that the threat of disappearing was not something that could be escaped by changing location—and kneeling down to help hold Erin so Alona could try to transfer in right then and there, if she wanted.